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After sustaining an open chest wound of 10cm long while trimming her horse’s mane, Sweden’s emergency response services refused to send an ambulance, suggesting the 11-year-old girl take aspirin instead.

The 11-year-old girl, who was cropping her horse’s mane, accidentally ran into the blades of a dirty pair of scissors as the mare jerked up its head.

The resulting gash to her ribs measured 10cm long, and according to the girl’s mother, was substantially open, reported Sweden’s national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).

The mother phoned SOS Alarm, the government-backed primary emergency response service, and described the child as shaking because she was in so much pain. She requested an ambulance because she did not have immediate access to a car.

The responding nurse refused the dispatch.

Instead she advised the mother to clean the wound, apply pressure and give her daughter aspirin which would give them eight hours to get to the nearest hospital, according to SvD.

It could have led to risk to the girl because emergency treatment was significantly delayed, declared an internal investigation launched by SOS Alarm, which determined the 11-year-old should have received an ambulance with high priority.

The probe also scrutinized the responding nurse’s protocol, concluding that the nurse did not ask sufficient questions regarding the girl’s wound, specifically related to the extent of the injury and amount of bleeding.

In a letter, the child’s mother described her daughter’s jacket as being soaked in a “very nasty blood.”

She said the trip to the hospital was “pure horror” and the first question she received from the hospital staff was “why didn’t you call an ambulance?”